Brits get to fondle Google Nexus 7 slab in just a fortnight

Now that Google is in tablets, it's clearly hoping to make its mark quickly, lining its Nexus 7 tablet up for shipping in the UK in two to three weeks.

The Nexus fondleslab was spotted lurking in pre-order form on the Play store at £159 for its 8GB version, but no sign of the 16GB one yet.

According to the site, the gear is expected to start shipping in two to three weeks, with a sweetener of £15 credit to spend in the Play store and some free content, like a copy of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

The long-rumoured Chocolate Factory fondleslab was unveiled just last night at the I/O conference in San Francisco, going for $199 for 8GB and $249 for 16GB in the US.

The tablet is more a competitor to the Kindle Fire than it is to the iPad, given that the tech has been somewhat pared away to ensure a lower price. The tablet has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and a 12-core graphics processor but just a 1280 x 800 HD screen and no rear camera.

However, pushing the tab out hastily in the UK, even just in its 8GB form, will give Google the jump on Amazon, whose Kindle Fire has yet to cross the pond.

The addition of the free content in the form of magazines, books and films shows that the web giant is marketing this as an entertainment fondleslab that is also ties some more Google strings to people by syncing up with its gear elsewhere like Chrome, Gmail, Drive, etc.

The fondleslab will also have the next version of the Android operating system, Jelly Bean, onboard, which features a few tweaks to the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade, such as offline voice recognition and some changes to the UI. A predictive search capability called Google Now, which learns the user's interest from their searches and location, is also packed into Jelly Bean. ®